John Nichols puts himself on #BlueAnon stupidity watch

The header is a pun on being on a "death watch," and post-Nov. 5, I wish I had thought of it sooner.

Nichols, the columnist at The Nation with the most visceral dislike for third parties, using his DSA Rosey fellating as a cudgel at times, yesterday seemed to think it was a big deal that Trump's share of the popular vote had officially fallen below 50 percent. (It had, per Wiki, as of Nov. 18, not 19, but as of yesterday evening when I wrote this, Wiki had Trump back at 50.0 percent.)

So, Wikipedia itself backstops my first callout of Nichols — he's shooting at a still-moving target.

So, this?

Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.

Might be a self-own.

And this?

Trump can no longer claim that powerful mandate. By most reasonable measures, the beginning point for such a claim in a system with two major parties is an overwhelming majority vote in favor of your candidacy. Trump no longer has that.

Certainly won't stop Trump from claiming a mandate. Shrub Bush was only a plurality president, if that, in 2000. Didn't stop him.

Nichols even, much later in the piece, admits this.

That won’t matter to Trump, who claimed a mandate even when he lost the 2016 popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Four years later, Trump refused to accept his defeat by more than 7 million votes, and denied that majority support for Biden in the 2020 election amounted to anything akin to a mandate.

So, why is this being written?

Nichols goes on to note how Harris was better than this, that, and the other candidates of years past, even as Wiki's page notes her EV results were the worst since Dukakis.

He says she did well and thus Democrats shouldn't despair.

He ignores the massive decline in Democratic turnout, the Hispanic shift and other things that can't all be blamed on Harris running a craptacular campaign, worsened by Dementia Joe's failure to drop out sooner. I mean, per Anton Chekhov, the gun from Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign stupidity in Great Lakes states was in the room in Act I. Then 2020 was Act II and here we are in Act III.

That then said, to riff on Corey Robin? Winning by 2 percentage points or more in an America, er Merikkka still frozen in the Sixth Party System, and unlikely to unfreeze in the near future, is something.

I saw this piece because it was trending on Google News. Probably a sign that a lot of BlueAnon other than Nichols need to be put, or put themselves, on that stupidity watch.

Reminder that, speaking of fellation, Nichols also did that long ago with fauxgressive Randy Bryce, aka Iron Stache.